what is the room size? carpets, amount of furniture? any treatment? speaker placement?
this is the in-room response of my old speakers, as measured with ARTA a few years back.

I'm showing the worst case scenario to make a point. A shoebox type room, no treatment with the speakers at the shorter wall, close to the room corners. There are certainly ways to improve my situation.

I'm showing the worst case scenario to make a point. A shoebox type room, no treatment with the speakers at the shorter wall, close to the room corners. There are certainly ways to improve my situation.

A shoebox type room is not necessarily a bad room to start with; trying different speaker locations and some room treatment might bring much improvement.
The Concertgebouw in Amsterdam is a shoebox type concert hall; it has about the best acoustics of all concert halls world wide. Another one, the Vienna music hall, is also of the shoebox variety.

I would be very interrested in measuring the freq. response of my room. Do you have affordable tools to suggest?

Not exactly cheap and it only deals with the bass region, but Velodyne's SMS-1 usually gets very good reviews. It can display the room's response and its problems and then (mostly) correct it with an 8-band parametric equalizer, continuous phase control and other features. IIRC it can be used with any brand of subwoofer.

I would be very interrested in measuring the freq. response of my room. Do you have affordable tools to suggest?

Another very affordable tool is a mini dsp.
When you take the time you can experiment with all possible configurations (equalization; filtering in case of multi-amping). In the end your own ears will tell. Use appropiate source material like male voices. With organ music it is not so difficult to locate and treat standing waves; just a suggestion.

Originally Posted by boris81
Hopefully these graphs will illustrate what we are talking about.
The 1st graph is the frequency response of my speaker.
The 2nd graph is how that same response is affected by the room.

Attachment 255087

Even the best speakers are at mercy of the room. And my room sucks.

Quote:

Originally Posted by canonnica

I would be very interrested in measuring the freq. response of my room. Do you have affordable tools to suggest?

Boris' room is actually fairly good, better than many recording studio control rooms I have measured.

In fact, just "fixed" a serious LF hole in the response in a control room by simply blocking off an entrance to another room, made the LF response far more even throughout the room, and eliminated the LF suckout that was happening at the client couch.

The most affordable tool to start with is a dB meter, your ears, and filtered pink noise of various low frequency frequency bands. Pink noise will give results more similar to music than sine waves

Various sine wave and filtered pink noise are available for free as downloads, or on test CDs.

You are right, the big JBLs, Infinities, Polk Audios etc etc etc are gone. I'm thinking big speakers might be coming back, the big old monsters are showing up in garages and a new generation is being exposed to giants of yore--the little cube junk just can't compare.

nice speakers, I once listened to a pair of Infinity's that looked almost identical except that the midranges were cones not ribbons. nice relaxed sound, very musical.

Those cone-mid speakers would be the RSII. The EMIM planar mids are extremely transparent now that I replaced the stock planar mylar diaphragms with true ribbon kaptan units made by Apogee Acoustics in Australia, and no more worries about blowing them out - in fact I removed all the fuses from the speakers.

You can see my homemade external passive crossovers behind the speakers, too.

Those cone-mid speakers would be the RSII. The EMIM planar mids are extremely transparent now that I replaced the stock planar mylar diaphragms with true ribbon kaptan units made by Apogee Acoustics in Australia, and no more worries about blowing them out - in fact I removed all the fuses from the speakers.

You can see my homemade external passive crossovers behind the speakers, too.

those were real speakers, nowadays there's a tendency towards cute little boxes with high WAF factor.

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